Fans who were at the right age when Street Fighter 2 ruled the world in the early 90’s remember that there were two films based off this franchise at the time. One of them was hard to find (in Ireland at least!) since it was a Japanese animated effort, and anime hadn’t yet become the ‘nerd-chic’ powerhouse market that it now is in the west (before the information age, ‘niche’ actually meant ‘niche’! As in, you couldn’t buy it anywhere!). But if you did manage to come across a copy of it on VHS, bootleg or otherwise, you were in for a shock: to kids used to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, this stuff was somewhat adult. It was definitely aimed at an older audience, and, unfamiliar with any form of Japanese weirdness, we didn’t quite know what to make of it. We certainly didn’t know what to make of the Chun-Lee-in-the-shower-scene, that’s for sure. April O’Neill never did anything like that.
But we’re not here to talk about that film.
No, we’re here to talk about the other Street Fighter film. The American one. The one that’s in many ways a far stranger beast. The film that came out just when US action movies were taking the world by storm. After Commando, Predator, First Blood, Rambo 2 and the high water-mark of Terminator 2, it must have seemed natural to movie executives to shoehorn the Street Fighter franchise into the action-movie format, rather than the tournament format that the backing story of the game demanded.
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